Blog 1 James Leman

Before reading this chapter in our book I had a completely different perception of the Bible. I am not the most religiously active person, but from the time I have spent in Catholic education and Sunday school I learned a few things. After reading this chapter I found things I believed to be true about the Bible to actually be false. Firstly, I believed that the person in the name of the gospel, for example Gospel of Mark, was the actual author of what we read in church on Sunday. It turns out that we do not even have the actual original copies of the New Testament, rather all we have are literally thousands of manuscripts copied by scribes that were actually written hundreds of years after the originals would have been written. According to Ehrman there are more discrepancies amongst the different copies of the NT than there are actual words![1]
Most of these discrepancies are minor things, such as spelling and simple mistakes made by scribes. For example in one copy of the Gospel of Luke the lines 12:8-9 are nearly identical. Line 8 reads "Whoever confesses me before humans, the son of man will confess before the angels of God". Line 9 reads "But whoever denies me before humans, will be denied before the angels of God"[2]. This is thought to be an error made by a scribe who simply lost his place in copying the document by hand since most people wrote in scriptua continuo. Since scribes are merely humans, they are bound to make mistakes of this nature, but some of these discrepancies found in the different manuscripts of the NT are ground shaking to peoples Christian faith. For example, the Story of Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery. This story is a favorite to many Christians and is told any where from Hollywood films all the way to your local Catholic church. Yet the story was not written by John in his original Gospel, the story did not begin to show up in the Gospel of John until nearly 800 years after the Gospel was originally written.[3] The story was added by a scribe and was a great story so it stuck and was adopted as original.
After reading this chapter I recalled a personal experience I encountered when in high school. When I went to public high school and played basketball we said the Lord's Prayer before every game or practice, but when I went to Catholic school and recited the Lords Prayer at the beginning of every day I found a difference between the two versions. I was taught that the last two lines were "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.” In Catholic school the Lord's Prayer ended in "and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen."

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[1] B. D. Ehrman, The New Testament (4; New York; Oxford; 2008), 490.

[2] B. D. Ehrman, The New Testament (4; New York; Oxford; 2008), 492.

[3] B. D. Ehrman, The New Testament (4; New York; Oxford; 2008), 491.

Bibliography

Ehrman, Bart D. The New Testament. Fourth Edition. New York, 2008: 490-492.